Songs of A Street Hustler

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: NIGHT AND THE CITY

DIRECTOR: IRWIN WINKLER

WRITER: RICHARD PRICE

THE BOTTOM LINE: A remake of a 1950 film noir provides Robert De Niro with a star turn around a muddy track.

HE WHEEDLES AND HE WHINES. HE schemes and he scams. He is full of false confidence and authentic desperation. He is Harry Fabian, a small-time New York City lawyer possessed by what he thinks are big-time dreams -- though the rest of us may not quite see them that way. He is played at full throttle by Robert De Niro in Night and the City, a movie that is, in its essence, a series of verbal arias for the star, occasions to demonstrate bravura technique.

At first these street hustler's songs are impressive, but finally they become tiresome. In part that's because the torrents of words, flung out as Harry scuttles frantically through his meaningless rounds, are a kind of screen, preventing us from making any real connection with Harry. In part it's because Harry's context is neither a realistic portrait of modern New York nor a persuasive movie metaphor -- as classic film noir often was -- for urban scuzziness.

Harry's practice, if so dignified a term may be applied to his professional scramblings, consists largely of filing false injury claims on behalf of not very bright clients. He yearns for something more dignified, and it is a measure of the man's limited imagination that insinuating himself into New York's moribund boxing game looks like a step up to him. His half-baked idea is to revive club fighting, which once kept half a dozen small arenas in the city busy. To help promote the plan he recruits a retired boxer named Al Grossman (Jack Warden, in a canny, counterpunching performance). This brings him into conflict with Al's brother Boom Boom (Alan King), a man of deadly self-importance, who also happens to be kingpin of what's left of the fight racket.

Talk about self-destruction! Harry is simultaneously muscling in on a mean and powerful man's family and his business. He's also conducting an affair with Helen (Jessica Lange), a waitress in the bar where he (and half of low- life New York) spends far too much time. This is not too smart either, for she is married to its manager, Phil (Cliff Gorman) -- short-tempered, mean- minded and, like Boom Boom, a man not to be trifled with.

Helen too has an overreaching plan, to leave Phil and open an upscale restaurant of her own. As she and Harry head toward failure, they also approach, but never attain, something like tragic status. As characters they are not complicated or resonant enough to sustain that kind of grandeur.

Indeed, as they lurch toward a conclusion that is merely melodramatic -- and rather lamely so -- you begin to wonder why, setting aside the opportunities for superficial flash offered to De Niro, anyone bothered with this enterprise, which is, in fact, a remake of a middling 1950 noir drama. It probably would have required the dark glamour of period conventions and convictions to sustain it. Director Irwin Winkler succeeds mainly in conveying his own edginess, and screenwriter Richard Price cannot seem to get his people grounded either in reality or in a metaphorically persuasive fictional realm. The result is a nervous and very distancing movie.